Welcome to SaaS thoughts

Whether you call it Software as a Service (SaaS), Managed Service Provider (MSP) or On-Demand Services, your organization uses the service running “in the cloud”. This blog will discuss these services, their benefits, drawbacks and operations. Are we biased? Yes. We believe that some services make sense for most organizations. Email security is one of those. However as Mark Twain said, “All generalizations are false, even this one.” Each Tuesday we will post information and questions about Software as a Service. Occasionally, we will have a "Guest Post" from either a consultant or vendor posting her/his thoughts on Managed Services generally as well as some degree of specificity based on her/his unique perspective. We encourage your insights, comments and feedback. Welcome.

Posts Tagged ‘hosted services’

There was a time when archiving email, instant messenger and file stores required tens of thousands of dollars in equipment and subscriptions. Cloud-based archiving with its “utility billing“, has brought the benefits of unlimited archive and unlimited retention to the smallest of businesses. Unfortunately, not all businesses are aware of the benefits of low-cost cloud-based archiving. If you want read some “horror stores” to avoid, click here.

Here are some frequent reasons we hear for delaying what could be a business-saving decision.

“We’re too small to need email archiving.”

This is wishful and limited thinking. If you can be sued (and who can’t today), you should be archiving your email and probably your documents. You have insurance so you pay small periodic amounts to avoid paying a huge amount in case of trouble. Same thinking applies to archiving; you pay a small per user per month fee and get unlimited storage and unlimited retention. However unlike insurance, there are benefits whether you get sued or not.

“Email is the “best” and most exciting evidence in court today.” – Robert E. Camors, Jr., Thelen Reid & Priest LLP. Over 90% of all documents created and received by businesses are now electronic. The majority will be emailed for review internally or externally to a client or vendor. Email will be one of the first pools of data to be tapped in any legal action. The faster your legal team can find the data it needs, the fewer hours you will see on your bill.

If the day ever comes when the sheriff knocks on the door, you want to quickly know how exposed you are. If you have your email and files archived in the same repository, your legal team can easily find the relevant data and help make the settle/go-to-court decision. The small investment you make in email and file archiving ahead may save your business.

“We don’t have the time.”

Today’s cloud-based archiving is quick to deploy. It takes about 5 minutes to start collecting your email. You can then import your old email messages if you wish.

Your users have self-service links to their archived messages where they can bring back that deleted message they need. This speeds up users searching for older messages and saves the IT staff time trying to retrieve deleted messages.

“We’re not in a regulated industry.”

OK, but are you in a state that requires rapid responses to e-discovery requests? Nevada, Ohio & Florida are states that have laws requiring businesses of any size to be able to respond to such requests. Most other states are considering such laws.

Just because you are not in a regulated industry doesn’t mean you won’t be sued. In fact, you could win a case but still be penalized for your inability to respond to e-discovery requests; in one case, for over $280,000. Regulated or not, it just makes good business sense to be prepared.

Being able to quickly respond to an e-discovery request puts the opponent off their game of one-upsmanship. We’ve been in the business of computerized litigation support for 25 years and have seen it firsthand. In one case, a complex request was faxed in from opposing council at 2 PM on Christmas Eve. As they expected, there were few people at the office. One paralegal checked the fax machine one more time before she was going home and found it. Because the client’s data was readily available, she was able to respond to the request within 20 minutes and no one’s Christmas vacation was spoiled (At least on the client’s side). Who’s Christmas vacation would have been spoiled to get the data from your backups so they could respond?

“We already backup our system.”

Backups are for disaster recovery not for archiving and courts know that. They don’t tolerate excuses or delays based on excess expense or time for not producing documents and messages on a reasonable basis. They also know that archiving is no longer the onerous cost it once was. This is especially true with today’s cloud-based archive solution.

An email archive indexes all messages. This means you can find messages across users and time. Want to know if and when Tom, Dick or Harry mentioned anything about the Kumquat project to Albert? That query will take just a few seconds to construct using the Search Wizard and a couple more seconds to complete. Want the result in PDF, PST or EML format? Just click and download. How long would it take you to make that query in your system now?

Business Intelligence bonus at your fingertips. Concerned about someone giving away your company’s intellectual property? Just open a browser and use the Search Wizard to easily monitor email for key words or documents. There is no way you can proactively monitor vital communication channels without email archiving.

Backup will not let you actively monitor email to spot something before you get sued. This is where the real money saver is.

We know of a case in which an employee selectively deleted email messages leaving only those that supported her position in a dispute against her boss. She forgot that every message has a sender and a recipient. You know that email you don’t want found? Someone has a copy of it. If you sent it, it had a recipient. If you received it, it had a sender. What if they forwarded the message to someone else? What if they have email archive?

An email archive system captures all the messages before anyone has a chance to delete anything. Once messages are archived, they cannot be deleted. No information can be legally “spoiled”.

Judges get testy when data gets spoiled. There are cases in which a judge gave the jury instructions to assume a side was trying to hide information because it had gotten deleted! You don’t want a jury thinking that about you.

Not archiving in today’s litigious society is like driving without insurance because you don’t believe you are going to get into an accident.

To find out how easy and inexpensive it is to start archiving, contact us at 770-603-0300 or click on the button at the top of the post to see how to reduce your exposure and gain the benefits of cloud-based archiving.